I came across the TIOBE Programming Community index a few minutes ago and was a little surprised by what I saw. As developers we all know that there’s much more work being done in different programming languages than what we are exposed to each day. But checking out the TIOBE indicator gives a pretty amazing look at what’s popular and what’s being used in the industry.

The TIOBE indicator is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written. – TIOBE.com

 

Think about it for a moment. Think about which languages you think are the most popular and then click on the link. How did you do? Are the ones that you use on a regular basis the ones that you thought were more popular (they were for me) and were you right (not really for me)? I think it demonstrates a certain level of bias that many programmers have that what we use is probably the best available – unless we’re forced by someone else to use their own favorite choice. It’s important that we be aware of those bias and what’s going on in the rest of the industry so we can grow as developers and remain up to date on our skill sets.